Justin McDaniel
Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA
At a single monastery it is possible to hear multiple stories. The stories you hear often depend on which image you find yourself near. In Wat Mahabut in Bangkok there are hundreds of images of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, ghosts, spirits, monks, and even babies. Almost every image has its own story and these stories are presented and represented on a daily basis by those you honor the images. Historians can trace some stories, but others are connected to individual visitors and can only be heard in fleeting encounters. This paper seeks to tell some of these stories and offer some new ways of thinking about the relationship between Buddhist images and the narratives that are associated with them in Thailand.
(Presented in the International Conference – Buddhist Narrative in Asia and Beyond, 9-11 August 2010, Imperial Queen's Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University with support from The Thailand Research Fund (TRF), in co-operation with Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Institute of Asian Studies, The Confucius Institute, Chulalongkorn University and l’École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO))